IT Process and Staff Impact Assessment

Quick Summary
This document provides a concise way to assess and summarize how the operations and support processes used by various IT staff will be impacted by what a team is deploying via their project.

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This document provides a concise way to assess and summarize how the operations and support processes used by various IT staff will be impacted by what a team is deploying via their project. It includes sections for:

Summarizing overall how the project will impact each distinct staff group within IT.

Evaluating how this project will affect the end user experience (the users within the organization who utilize the applications, infrastructure, etc. that IT provides) -- and thus how IT's support of those end users could be impacted, and what new documentation or training should be considered.

Identifying what specific process areas within IT could be impacted, and therefore what specific training or documentation or other actions are required as part of the project.

Why it's useful

This assessment helps ensure that this projectÕs impacts to end users and to IT staff are discussed and analyzed early, so that the project plan can then include any activities necessary to update documentation, provide new IT staff or end user training. Without such activities included in the plan from the beginning, the project will be under-scoped and disruptions will occur later when the needs are belatedly realized; or even worse, the project deployment could experience severe issues if these impacts, and resulting documentation or training needs are never identified.

Drafting this document during early high-level design work also helps the team make design, feature, and technical decisions with these impacts in mind.

How to use it

Use the sections of this document to help identify IT staff and process-related operations, maintenance, and user support areas the project will impact. (Feel free to add additional items for your project if desired.)

Draft a first version of the IT Process and Staff Impact Assessment using that information.

Get input and feedback from IT staff and related vendors/partners as needed.

Remember that not all staff members are alike.

Be sure to include impacts from a range of staff experience levels, especially regarding user-facing support staff.

Consider using all the available channels to communicate with staff to understand impacts now and later to communicate throughout the project as any training and documentation become available and deployment draws near. (Include this activity in your Communication Plan.)

Update the project schedule to include tasks for specific IT process definition, documentation creation or updates, and creation, updates, and delivery of any necessary IT staff training.

As the team proceeds through the project, periodically revisit the impact assessment to see if any detailed design or implementation decisions have led to additional or changed impacts to any group.

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